"Mothers Birth the Nation": The Social Construction of Zionist Motherhood in Wartime in Israeli Parents' Manuals

Who is a proper Zionist child? And who is a proper Zionist mother? These questions have been an inherent part of the subtext of the Israeli nationbuilding process from the start. To consider them here, we will employ a textual field which, thus far, has almost wholly escaped attention: the early parenting guides, known as parents’ manuals, used in Israel from the 1920s through the late 1950s. During the 1920s and 1930s, a group of Israeli physicians and psychologists inaugurated what would become a prolonged effort to provide child-rearing guidance for parents. At the time, the establishment of the State of Israel was no more than a wish for Israelis (and perhaps the worst nightmare of their Arab neighbors). The Jewish towns and villages in Mandate-era Palestine were not heavily populated, but their inhabitants were fully aware of what they saw as their historical role in creating a “new native Jew.” The principal argument of this paper is that Israeli mothers of that era embraced their duty as “mothers of the nation” neither by chance nor as a consequence of some kind of natural process; rather, they were subjected to an unremitting program of education, indoctrination and regulation that formed the subtext of the apparently innocuous medical advice provided to them throughout their childbearing years. Ideological messages were embedded within the most ordinary counsel regarding proper breastfeeding, toilet training, and how to avoid spoiling one’s children. The boundaries that restricted women primarily to their domestic and maternal duties owed much to the ongoing perception of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in what would become Israel), and afterward of the State